Sunday, February 11, 2007

Revision part 2

I'm still at it, more than halfway through with step 2 of Carolyn See's method. I read through the entire manuscript and then started over, detailing each page. It can be painful, but as Carolyn told me the other day via email, it saves a lot of time and mess later.

I've been searching out various methods of revision, and so far Carolyn's is the best.

5 comments:

I'm in the Joe Eszterhazy camp on revision: I retype the whole thing with each draft. It's not terribly daunting when you're dealing with short stories, but has the advantage that you're forced to re-read and evaluate every word (unless you slip into autopilot transcription mode). That said, draft 2 (I'm on draft 1.5, having realized at 24,000 words that I needed to start over) will entail some serious re-writing. I plan to do some big-time re-structuring of the story, making sure that my chapters form good arcs and probably adding/deleting characters. I'll most likely be doing an outline (for the first time on this novel) once I have the first draft done and I have a better sense of what I need to have happen at the beginning of the story. I anticipate doing at least one more full re-type of the manuscript after that, then maybe being able to do some editing in place to really polish everything up.

Congragulations on finishing the first draft of `Starletta's Kitchen'. It sounds like a wonderful, earthy, wise book just like the woman who wrote it. All the best with all future endeavors, creative or otherwise.

Oh, congratulations!! I've been attempting Holly Lisle's one pass revision technique. So far it's not working. Maybe with a few novels under my belt I'll be better at the one pass method. I'd love to hear what you think of the method you are using!

BTW - I podcast Writers on Writing and it has been part of the arsenal to keep me motivated to write this year - the year I finally completed a novel!

Hello! I'm on Carolyn See's step 2... working off of the "map" and plowing through page by page, fixing "fixes." Sigh. Hard, hard work. This is my third novel, the only one I've finished and the only one I've beleived in enough to muck through the messy trenches. I'm still trying to meld the story I am telling with the story I thought I was telling. Heavier sigh. ~Kathryn

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About Barbara

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is author of the bestselling and award-winning Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within (Harcourt, 2004), which is now in its 8th printing. She has a short story, "Crazy for You," in Orange County Noir, published by Akashic Books (2010) and an essay, "Knitting, My Urban Escape," in Knitting Through It (Voyageur, 2008). She hosts and produces Writers on Writing, which airs Weds. at 9 a.m. Pacific on KUCI-FM 88.9 in Orange Co., Ca, and streams live at www.kuci.org